Hungarian-English travel dictionary

Wish to learn the basic expressions in Hungarian before entering the country? Here we have collected for you some general information about Hungarian and the most common phrases you might need.

Hungarian is a fascinating language. It's quite an oddball - surrounded by slavic and germanic languages, by which we mean that none of the surrounding coutries speak anything like this nearly-unique language!

It is said to be a difficult language to learn, mostly because it is so different from all the other (Indo-European) languages. For example, Hungarian has a complicated set of 20 cases instead of prepositions like "on", "under" and more complicated ideas like "away from", and these are added to word stems as suffixes. in addition, each of these cases has two versions, as all suffixes in Hungarian obey a rule called vowel harmony, to make the final composite word "sound right". To further complicate matters, hungarian has no gender and speakers of this language often mix up the words "he" and "she", as this idea is just not differentiated in speech.

On the positive side for foreign speakers of Hungarian, it uses the latin alphabet, though it has a few extra letters, because almost all sounds have just one written form. Furthermore emphasis is always on the first syllable of any word. This all means that unlike English, any unknown Hungarian word can be pronounced, if you know the pronunciation rules.

Tourist dictionary(English-Hungarian)

The pronunciatiuon of some Hungarian vowels is different from their English counterparts: a - say it like the a at the end of 'Amerika' - somewhere between the vowel sounds in cut and cot á - starts like the middle sound of 'cat' but is quite a bit longer e - say it like the start of 'enter' é - is a bit wider sound, such as the middle sound in 'way' or the one after 'w' in 'whale' ö, ő - sound like the one after 'w' in 'whirl' or the 'u' in 'church' u, ú - sound like 'ou' in 'you' or the end of 'do' ü, ű - say it like the one starts 'urgent' o, ó, i, í - sounds the same as in english, except that the ones with the ascent are longer, and i is always sounds like 'ee' in 'see' never 'ay' like in the word 'icon'

Consonents (Only those that differ from English are listed here)

c - always a soft sound, like tz in Tzar cs - like ch in church dz - like the consonent in adze dzs - like J in Jungle gy - nearly the same as the j in judge, but slightly softer - a cross between d and y ly - like y in year ny - like the first sound in new s - like sh in sheep sz - like a standard s, for example, in sound ty - sounds like the t in top and the ch in chop combined quickly. w - not really used in Hungarian - only in foreign words, and pronounced exactlz like the letter v zs - a soft sound like in Dr Zhivago

A list of helpful words (easy pronuciation tip - enter any hungarian word in Google translate and press the loudspeaker symbol to hear it - the intonation will not be always be correct though - stress is always on the first syllable. )